Werner Best

Werner Best (10 July 1903-23 June 1989) was an SS-Obergruppenfuehrer of Nazi Germany and the civilian administrator of occupied France and Denmark during World War II.

Biography
Werner Best was born in Darmstadt, Hesse, and he joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel in 1931. He was promoted to Brigadefuehrer in September 1939, and he headed Department 1 of the Gestapo and served as an aide to Reinhard Heydrich. In 1939, he became the man responsible for choosing Einsatzgruppen leaders, choosing them from among educated people with military experience, many of them former Freikorps. From 1940 to 1942, he was the civilian administrator of occupied France, and he was appointed Plenipotentiary to Denmark in 1942, supervising civilian affairs in the country. He assumed direct control over administration on 29 August 1943, and he was plenipotentiary until the war's end in May 1945. Best failed to round up the majority of Danish Jews for deportation to concentration camps during the Holocaust, as Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz and the Danish Resistance sabotaged his plans. In 1948, he was sentenced to death in denmark, but this was later commuted to five years in prison. He joined a network that helped former Nazis and demanded amnesty for them, and he died in Muelheim, North Rhine-Westphalia in 1989.